Okay, y'all need to read this. At least give them a cursory glance as they will explain how combat and damage works and what skills you can choose from. Please note that Cthulhu Mythos is NOT a part of the game and neither is the skill.

-There will be precious little new skills, but those that are new will be listed within a short period of time.

-Your education points will be limited by your profession, so wait until I have posted available skills for the different professions.

- Your intelligence (interest) skill points can be freely distributed and reflects your hobbies and interests. You can choose accounting and art, but in the wilderness those skills are rare.

Well, I'll try to start a thread here. As Nick Brooke reminded us in today's (5/19/93) RQ Daily, the current SR system has awkward stat based breakpoints, among other problems. Now, one possible fix for this is the alternate SR system proposed by George Harris on the net last year. In anyone hasn't seen that, I'll include it here. Skip on down for further discussion if you're familiar with it.

As most of you probably know, when one attacks with a melee or missileweapon and when a spell takes effect are in a large part determined by one'sDex and Siz strike rank modifiers. The underlying assumtion of this mechanicis that the more dextrous one is the sooner one acts, and the larger one isthe quicker one lands a blow in melee. I am not going to contest theseassumtions, but rather try and streamline how they are implemented.

Ordinarily, when one is using a missile weapon (or casting a spell), oneacts on Dex Strike Rank (plus the magic points in the spell), and when oneis using a melee weapon, one acts on the sum of Dex Strike Rank and SizStrike Rank and Weapon Strike Rank. These are the main uses of the Dex/SizStrike Rank table. However, there are two things that should strike youabout this table:

One: It is not an even progression. The steps alternate in sizebetween four and six, rather than being a constant five.

Two: Siz Strike Rank alone is never used for anything, but isonly used in conjunction with Dex Strike Rank.

The first item is easy to fix. Just make the intervals 1-4, 5-9, 10-14,15-19, 20+. As for the second, I propose replacing the Siz Strike Rankcolumn with a combined Dex+Siz Strike Rank column to be used for figuringmelee strike rank.

As the table stands, someone with a Dex 10 and Siz 10 would have a meleestrike rank of 5. However, someone with Dex 9 and Siz 11 would have a meleestrike rank of 6, as would someone with Dex 11 and Siz 9. Since, the way thesystem is structured, Siz and Dex are equally important in figuring meleestrike rank, this result doesn't seem proper. Therefore, I propose using thefollowing table for figuring melee strike rank:

The advantages of this table are that it eliminates the standard optimalbreakpoints for Siz and Dex, and also regularizes the progression. Onecould complain that it is undesirable for a table to use the sum of twocharacteristics, but as the damage bonus table already does this, thatobjection doesn't stand. Of course, one would still use the Dex Strike Ranktable to figure strike ranks for spells and missile weapons. --"If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste more likeprunes than rhubarb does." -Groucho Marx gharris@jade.tufts.edu George Harris, Tufts Univ. Dept. of Mathematics

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Now, my group and myself have been using this rule for a while now, and it works well with one correction. With the normal human range of SIZ, everything is copacetic, but if you start using this with trolls, giants, and scorpionmen, those with SIZ>>20 pose the following problem. If the creatures DEX SR is less than their SIZ SR in the old system, the new will give them a melee SR less than their DEX SR. In other words, they could hit with a maul before they could throw an axe. This is fixed by just ruling that any SIZ > 20 uses SIZ=20 in the Melee SR table. In this case, their Melee SR would equal their DEX SR, which gives the same result as the current system.